


Celestial Burn

by VenetaPsi



Category: Banana Bus Squad
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Angst and Humor, Angst and Tragedy, Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempted Murder, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Happy Ending, Heavy Angst, Implied Soft Romance, John Is Annoying, M/M, Male Friendship, Murder, Paranormal, Poltergeists, Romantic Fluff, Smitty isn't afraid of some little ghost, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:41:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21551632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VenetaPsi/pseuds/VenetaPsi
Summary: Smitty leaned against the wall at the top of his stairs, glaring daggers at the door that was open again, after three days of consecutively being open every single time he went upstairs, despite him closing it each time. His scowl intensened.He was not about to be beat by a goddamn door.Struck by a sudden idea, Smitty strode down the hallway, stepping into the dark storage room and flicked on the light. Searching the area nearest the entrance, he found the heaviest box he could grab and dragged it out into the hall before shutting the door and pushing the box up against it.“Stay,” He ordered sternly, pointing at the door knob before turning and walking back into his room.
Relationships: John | KryozGaming & Jaren Smith, John | KryozGaming/Jaren Smith
Comments: 22
Kudos: 232





	Celestial Burn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [probsjosh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/probsjosh/gifts).



> Gifted to probsjosh for leaving some of the most genuinely heartfelt and humorous comments I've ever read. It's people like you that keep me going; keep me writing and keep me motivated. Thank you so much, my man <3 I love you
> 
> TRIGGER WARNINGS: a violent scuffle including an attempt at strangulation, and a brief vivid description of violence. Multiple references to murder and loss. 
> 
> Side note; I will always and forever refer to Smitty as "Smitty" in most/almost all cases, as he's stated he's not comfortable with people using his actual name. I'm not sure why the Ao3 character tag for him was changed.

“Here you are, young man.” 

Smitty’s fingers reflexively tightened on the strap of his backpack, adjusting it for the hundredth as he clicked the lock and stepped out of the old Chevy pickup.

The air felt sweltering; hot and humid despite the sky being pink with sunset, and Smitty stared at his new house as the car fell silent behind him and the driver-side door slammed; his soon-to-be landlord climbed out. 

“It look like you expected?” The man called out with a grin, and Smitty hummed noncommittally, taking the building in. 

It was well kept for how little he was paying for lease; grass trimmed, paint and siding kept in good repair. The building, despite being separated and relatively solitary on the street, was built in a thin and tall townhouse style; small in area but with decidedly two floors. It was cute, he decided, the building’s compact structure. It had charm. Still, it gave off the strange appearance of having been taken from a city and plopped down all alone; that or all its fellow buildings had been lifted out of the ground and carried away. 

“I like it,” he responded after a moment, and the man chuckled from his position by the open trunk as he removed Smitty’s boxes and two suitcases. 

“Why are you comin’ to our town, lad?”

“College,” Smitty told him simply, and his landlord nodded as if he’d expected something along those lines. “Can I help you?” 

The man waved off Smitty’s attempts to assist in the unloading, instead digging in his pocket before offering the young Canadian the house keys. 

“Go explore,” he joked, and Smitty gave him a small, sheepish grin as he accepted the keyring. The man continued to shoo him away, so Smitty turned and began to walk down the sidewalk to the front door. 

The key slid into the lock easily and turned with a resounding click, and Smitty tucked the key into his back jeans pocket as he pushed the door open and stepped inside. 

The front entrance consisted of a little three-walled area that opened straight up into the living room; an open floored plan that also encompassed a table and the kitchen all into one space. The place was barebones and simple, but by _god_ was it better than the college dorms. This place was happily livable for a single man and Smitty found himself wondering again what the catch was for the price. 

He caught himself. The lease had not been unreasonably cheap by any means, simply unusual for a house of this size, and the landlord had been nothing but kind and jovial. 

Setting his thoughts of money and finance aside, Smitty looked at what he assumed to be a bathroom tucked away behind a closed door before he turned to the nearby stairs and mounted them. 

Upon reaching the top, he saw a door to his right that opened up into a bedroom; fitted with a bed frame and mattress, a desk, a closet and a window on the far wall, alongside a couple other sporadic furniture fixings. 

Right across the hall from the bedroom was another bathroom that seemed smaller than the one downstairs, but was equipped with a shower and a frosted, opaque window. There was a final door on the left side of the hallway a little ways down, and Smitty pushed it open softly to see a dark room; lit only by the faint light that managed to force its way through the blackout curtains on the far wall. 

He fumbled by the door for a light switch, and when he clicked it down he was revealed a small, office-like space with another desk and numerous different containers and drawers. There were boxes all over the floor and a bookshelf in a far corner that was packed with books, nick-nacks and plastic tubs of cords and old electronics. 

If Smitty had to guess, he’d say this was all of the old tenants’ stuff, or maybe a combination of old leasers and the original owner; all things left behind over the years. As he stepped inside for a closer look however, he noticed that aside from a few new containers closer to the door, most of the other boxes in the room had seemingly the same amount of dust and fade on their surfaces, alongside the far off items. No, this was mostly one person’s stuff, he decided, and an old tenant’s at that. 

Figuring he'd deal with them later, if ever, Smitty stepped back out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him, and headed downstairs again. 

His landlord had placed all of his boxes down on and around the table, and glanced up when Smitty approached, a half-smile on his lips as he stared around the house, almost nostalgically. 

“You need anything else lad? Or are you good to go?”

“I think I’m alright,” Smitty smiled slightly, glancing around the room again. “Thank you for getting me and all my stuff here.” 

The man waved a hand dismissively and said it was no problem before pulling a spare set of keys from his pocket and placing them on the table. 

“Oh, and I put your bike just inside the front entrance.” With that, his landlord glanced around one final time before giving Smitty a half-salute and heading for the door.

Smitty watched him go until the front door shut with a click, then turned slowly, gaze circling the room. 

He had a _house._

Smitty grinned.

He’d arrived in town three weeks before the school year began in order to give himself a little time to adjust to living on his own in America rather than with his parents back home. He’d severely underestimated however, the amount of cleaning, shopping and organizing that came out of moving somewhere new. The first week was spent just putting everything into his house; setting up his computer and electronics at his bedroom desk (having to make multiple trips to the nearest Meijer to buy cords), and putting everything else that belonged in the kitchen, bathroom, garage, excetera, where it belonged.

Then for the next week and a half he bought or ordered online all of the things he’d forgotten, or never considered needing in a house. Cleaning supplies, a broom, hand soap, a tool kit, duck tape. Things that had always conveniently lay around the house at home but he suddenly lacked. 

Just about two weeks into his inhabitants of his new house, he struggled up the stairs with a basket of laundry and paused, huffing slightly when he saw the door at the end of the hallway open; the storage room he hadn’t yet touched. Smitty dumped his basket on the bed, went and shut the door, then returned to fold his laundry. 

He wouldn’t have thought anything about it except for the fact that it _kept happening._

Smitty leaned against the wall at the top of his stairs, glaring daggers at the door that was open again, after three days of consecutively being open every single time he went upstairs, despite him closing it each time. His scowl intensened. 

He was not about to be beat by a goddamn door. 

Struck by a sudden idea, Smitty strode down the hallway, stepping into the dark storage room and flicked on the light. Searching the area nearest the entrance, he found the heaviest box he could grab and dragged it out into the hall before shutting the door and pushing the box up against it. 

“Stay,” He ordered sternly, pointing at the door knob before turning and walking back into his room. 

That night he was jolted awake by the sound of a loud _‘thump’_ and plastic hitting wood. Confused, the Canadian slipped out of bed, rubbing his eyes tiredly, and stepped out into the hallway, fumbling for the light switch and blinking sporadically against the sudden harsh light. 

The box lay tipped on its side in the middle of the hallway, cases upon cases of CDs spilling out across the floor almost like a liquid that had toppled over. 

The storage room door was wide open. 

“Subtle,” Smitty grumbled, turning and promptly walking back to bed. 

Smitty never believed in ghosts. Not exactly. He certainly thought there were things in life that couldn’t be explained by himself, but his rational had always been that if he couldn’t explain it, something or someone else could. 

The door couldn’t be explained. 

A draft was out of the question. No draft was specific enough with timing to occur if he so much as went downstairs for a second. Furthermore, no draft could have pushed the door open with enough force to spill the heavy box of CDs he had used as a doorstop and not have destroyed the contents of the office over the years. 

And for the life of him, Smitty could not figure out any other idea that could possibly explain what had happened. 

So Smitty decided until the explanation presented itself, the next logical conclusion was that he had a ghost. That really wanted that door open. For some reason. 

The next morning he packed all of the CDs back into their box, placed the container back in the storage room, then went downstairs to make coffee. 

He didn’t shut the door behind him. 

The next time he climbed the stairs, he found the door still open, the remainder of the hallway exactly as it had always been. 

He gave the door a tired grin, clutching his coffee in both hands, and headed into his room. 

College started, and Smitty’s sleep schedule crumbled within the first week.

On days he had class he biked the fifteen minute ride to campus, bought himself lunch at a coffee shop and returned sometime in the late afternoon/evening. 

Other days he sat at his desk and worked on homework in a notebook, worked on homework on the computer, or played video games. 

One time Smitty stormed into the house, frustrated with an idiot teacher and roaring with a caffeine fueled sense of entitlement, only to walk into his kitchen to find his fridge door wide open. 

He blinked at the practically empty shelves before storming over and slamming it shut. 

“That wastes electricity, asshole.” The words were barked to no one, but all of a sudden a nearby cabinet slammed open with a sharp crash, causing Smitty to whirl as he let out an undignified shriek. 

The cabinet was empty too. 

“Tell me to go grocery shopping without giving me a heart attack next time!” Smitty snapped, slamming the cabinet shut too and storming out of the kitchen. 

The light over the dining table flickered, and Smitty flipped it off as he stomped up the stairs. 

He went grocery shopping that afternoon, and the next morning awoke to a package of crackers split open and empty on the counter while the crackers lay in the design of a big smiley face on the floor. 

“I need an exorcist,” Smitty grumbled. 

The Canadian took the whole ‘I have a polterguist with a heavy fucking attitude living in my house’ thing in stride. It was a lot like having a younger sibling, he decided; someone slamming doors and drawers and just being a relatively harmless nuisance. 

They got in arguments; Smitty rolling his eyes and yelling nonsense while a light flickered back angrily at him; His own blanket attempting to smother him while he shrieked and fought it off before threatening to go buy a cross and start stabbing the air with it. 

Other times they got along. 

“Where the fuck is my key?” Smitty snapped, starting to panic as he scanned his room again and didn’t see the bit of metal anywhere. 

All at once his closet door slid open, and Smitty watched dumbfounded as his clothes rattled before his keyring tumbled out of the pocket of the jacket he’d used the previous day. 

“....thanks,” Smitty hesitantly replied, picking the keys up and watching in mild amazement as his closet door smoothly slid shut once more. 

It being early October, he bought a little ghost cookie with a flower in its hair at the coffee shop and brought it home, leaving it on the counter with a note saying’ 

_I got you a girlfriend_

The next morning he came downstairs to the cookie completely crushed into crumbs and a piece of printer paper lying beside the mess, a squiggly drawing of a ghost with a penis and the block letters **‘DICK’** messily penned out with a sharpie. 

Smitty nearly pissed himself he laughed so hard. That day he came home with another ghost cookie, this time one with a bow tie. 

He laughed even harder when that morning he found the cookie drenched in milk from an overturned carton and another message saying **‘ACCEPTABLE’.**

That’s how his resident polterguist came out to him as gay. 

Over time, Smitty began to think of his ghost as less of an annoying sibling and more of an annoying roommate. In a way, he was actually greatful the spirit (or whatever the fuck it was) was there, because it made him feel like he wasn’t living alone. What might’ve creeped some people out actually calmed him, because to Smitty it felt like having a friend despite he himself knowing no one and being in a foreign country. 

One night as he lay awake in bed, he asked aloud to the air what the ghost’s name was. 

“I can’t just keep calling you ‘that fucking annoying invisible thing’.”

In the morning, a post-it-note was stuck to his monitor, with the message **’JOHN’**.

A couple days later, Smitty took a detour on the way home and presented John with a name puzzle when he arrived back at the house. That evening as he sat at his desk, Smitty watched the pieces of the puzzle take apart and put themselves together on his bed as he chewed through his assignments. 

It was cute, Smitty decided, grinning. 

It was less cute the next day when Smitty came home to his tool kit lying on the table, sawdust everywhere and a board of his stairs ripped up and sawed into a makeshift puzzle that spelled out _’Jaren’_. 

“I have to pay for that,” Smitty whined. “How am I supposed to get a board home from a hardware store on a bike?” 

The dining table light flickered slowly. Sad almost. 

Smitty sighed, sitting down at the table, brushing some sawdust away and beginning to solve the puzzle.

“You’re cleaning this up,” He ordered, twiddling a background piece contemplatively between his fingers. 

That evening when he came downstairs to get a snack, everything was put away and swept up; and the dishes were washed as a seeming apology.

Smitty quite liked his roommate. 

“Were you real?” Smitty blurted, rolling a stylus between his fingertips as he stared at his half-finished design on the computer with growing trepidation. “I mean- are you human? Were you alive once?” 

The room was silent and still for several moments, and suddenly Smitty felt guilty. 

“You don’t have to-” 

The quiet was broken by the distant creaking of hinges, and Smitty’s gaze snapped to his open bedroom door and the hallway beyond. Hesitantly, he set his stylus down beside his tablet and rose to his feet, padding quietly across the carpeted floor and out into the hall. 

The storage room door swayed gently a few times before going still, and taking the hint Smitty approached cautiously. The air felt heavy; thick, and for the first time Smitty felt his pulse quicken with unease at the sight of boxes effortlessly raising into the air and moving to clear him a path straight to the desk and bookshelf at the back of the room. 

Smitty’s footsteps sounded deafening in the silence as he slowly made his way towards the desk, gaze automatically falling on the shoe box that lay on a nearby rolling chair who’s top rose silently upward before clattering to the ground with a _‘thump’_ that made Smitty flinch. 

The top item in the box was an overturned picture frame, and Smitty gently picked it up, turning it over in his hands. 

His breath caught at the image of a man about his age, with a mop of brown curls and a half amused, half sarcastic grin, staring off at someone outside of frame. His eyes were a striking blue, emphasized by his yellow and black striped shirt, and a thin silver chain hung around his neck and shone against his pale skin. 

“Is this you?” Smitty whispered into the heavy atmosphere, finger tracing lightly over the smooth metal frame of the photograph. 

The silence was answer enough. 

Smitty wrestled with what to do with the storage room for days. He’d quickly figured out that all of the oldest boxes and items; the majority of the room’s contents, were John’s. In fact, practically all of the items that would’ve been in the house at John’s time living there had been stuffed into the office, he discovered, after noticing multiple boxes marked ‘kitchen supplies’ or ‘bathroom’. 

All of his things left behind, combined with John’s mere presence in the house, led Smitty to the most logical and most heart wrenching conclusion. 

John had died in this house. 

It was something Smitty hadn’t really ever considered. He’d never thought of John as a real person before, had always just accepted him as this playful extraterrestrial force. It was sobering to realize that the only reason John was here was because he had not lived past the age of twenty four. 

Smitty felt sick just thinking about it. 

One night as he lay curled up on the couch, the TV playing softly, Smitty finally asked the question that had been burning through him ever since he’d seen John’s photograph. 

“...how did you die?” 

After a moment of no response, the channel suddenly switched to a ‘real crime’ episode, right on the image of a dead body and a man in handcuffs, covered in blood and screaming angrily.

The TV changed channels again to a popular News channel, where the woman was talking about a crime that had never been solved, and the criminal never caught. 

Smitty stayed silent the rest of the night. 

It wasn’t everyday one learned their best friend was the victim of a cold case murder, and Smitty ended up skipping class one day to just lay in bed and try to get over the termoil in his mind. 

John had been silent as well for nearly two days, and the house felt still and cold without the routine noises or flashing lights the poltergeist usually caused. 

That night, when Smitty finally forced himself to get up, the Canadian sat down at his computer and began doing extensive research on the local area, and more specifically, past crimes. 

He found another picture of twenty three year-old John Keyes, a friend’s arm slung around his shoulders and the brunet himself rolling his eyes, a soft, fond smile on his lips.

Smitty stared for several minutes silently, feeling strangely numb and void, his heart heavy. 

The picture was from four days before the man has been murdered in his own house, a place Smitty had learned was literally his living room, directly downstairs. 

A swish of cloth echoed from behind him, and before Smitty could turn around his blanket settled gently over his shoulders, wrapping around him almost like a hug. His mouse moved of its own accord beneath his fingers, closing the tabs. John’s face vanished in favor of Smitty’s generic windows background. 

“...I’m so sorry…” Smitty mumbled quietly, and the blanket squeezed tighter for just a moment. 

They sat together quietly until Smitty fell asleep in his chair. It rolled softly over to the bed, bumping the bed frame gently as Smitty was half lifted, half rolled onto the mattress, the Canadian waking drowsily for a moment before burrowing under his covers and drifting off once more. 

The school year dragged on, and slowly John and Smitty both returned to their prior sassy selves. In fact, Smitty made himself a couple friends at his classes; a junior named Evan who was there for a music degree and an international student named David whose subjects were architecture and and a minor in art history. 

David didn’t know anymore about the past of the town then Smitty did, but Evan (who was also Canadian but had moved to a nearby town as a child) was practically a local. 

In fact, Evan had stared at Smitty in shock the first time Smitty had told him where he lived, and when questioned, continued to tell him that nobody had ever stayed in that particular house for longer than a month, let alone what was edging on five. 

Smitty couldn’t imagine why. 

Then Smitty asked about John, and for the first time got a proper answer. Everything online had been memorialized or painfully vauge, but Evan told Smitty about how the surrounding towns had found out about the murder. 

The story was that one of John’s friends had gone to his house after he hadn’t responded to anyone for two days, and found his body. He’d been strangled to death, and the police suspected either a jaded lover, a jealous employee or a political fanatic (John had a rather high paying job on a local radio station talk-show, and was neither soft spoken nor conservative about what he said or how bluntly he dished it out).

Smitty listened quietly as Evan told him all about the several months that followed, about how every city in the county was on alert for a murderer, but there weren’t any leads. Practically no evidence of any kind could be found. The door hadn’t been forced, so the intruder had a key, but nobody who could have had a key (the landlord or several of John’s friends) were suspicious at all, and the spare key hidden near the garage hadn’t been touched. 

“It was a perfect murder,” Evan told him softly. “It was how parents disciplined their children for several years. ‘If you act up, this is what’ll happen to you.’ The police were stumped, and with no evidence and no more sequential murders, the case was left cold. It still is.”

Smitty stared down at his hands and tried to swallow the sudden lump in his throat. 

“...I think several of his friends still live nearish the town,” Evan continued slowly, “Though I don’t think they’d really want to talk about John. The media hounded them for months after the incident. It was disgusting, no one could let it rest. A lot of them moved away because of it.”

“...thank you.” Smitty rose to his feet, chest aching, and gave Evan a stiff nod. The man smiled back at him sadly.

“I hope you figure out what you’re trying to.” He said softly, and Smitty’s gaze snapped to him momentarily before he turned again to leave. 

“Yeah. Me too,” he murmured. 

“I can’t tell if you’re insanely picky about music, or just ADHD” Smitty groaned into his pillow, face down in the bed as he listened to the music on the spotify playlist change for the fifteen time in the last ten minutes. 

For a moment the current rap song continued to play before ‘I’m sexy and you know it’ suddenly rang out over the speakers, and Smitty couldn’t help but laugh. He sat up with a wide grin and stretched before smirking in the vague direction of his phone. 

“You’re a solid seven out of ten. Maybe an eight, I’m feeling cute today.”

Smitty waited expectantly, and right on cue the music changed to ‘Fuck you~ Fuck you very very muuuuuch~’ and the Canadian started cackling. 

A couple minutes later Smitty’s phone dinged, and he reluctantly climbed out of bed to pick the electronic up and look. In actuality, John had just set a reminder on his phone, and Smitty scanned the request for him to buy nail polish and the other related items curiously. 

“You...know you can’t use this, right?” Smitty pointed out, and his bedroom lights flickered in annoyance. “What, do you want to paint my nails?” 

There was a moment of silence before Smitty rolled his eyes fondly and sighed. 

“Are you good at it at least?” 

‘I’m the best’ began to play over the speakers and Smitty sighed loudly.

“Alright, alright, let’s not get conceited here.”

Smitty had to admit, he was a fan of painted nails. David was quite amused, and recommended red next time. John was a blue fan. For two days Smitty parroted John’s arguments about blue to David, and eventually Smitty managed to convince John to paint one of his hands a bright crimson and the other cerulean. 

David was pleased, and John finally relented that red wasn’t that bad. 

Smitty left his bedroom one afternoon to the storage door swinging insensibly. Smitty hadn’t stepped foot in the office since the picture incident, so he reluctantly followed John’s urging into the room, following the motion of objects back to the bookshelf and the small case on one of the upper shelves. 

Gingerly his lifted the small box down to reveal a flat plastic container with a clear lid, filled with foam. Smitty’s breath caught as his noticed the rings inside, most made of polished, tarnished metal with the occasional gold or jewels. 

“They're beautiful,” he remarked, and a nearby radio buzzed appreciatively. 

Smitty sat down on the floor, carefully lifting the lid before gently running his fingers over the cool metal, trying not to eye the couple empty slots too hard. He settled on one in the center, a gold band with a large ruby on top. He lifted the ring up, turning it gently in the thin beam of light coming in from between the curtains. 

“This one was your favorite, wasn’t it,” He teased lightly, laughing when the lights flickered in a particular way that Smitty could now recognize as a laugh. 

Then a piece of paper fluttered off the desk to settle on the floor by Smitty’s foot. He slipped the ring back into the container and shut the lid before picking up the paper, starting at the address listed and the message underneath. 

_they have the ones I was wearing that night in the evidence locker at the local police station. maybe could you ask them if they could give them back to the house? they mean a lot._

Smitty’s gut twisted, and a crushing sadness washed over him. 

“Yeah...of course I can, John.” 

A slight whistle of air sounded in Smitty’s ear, and he felt his hair rustle slightly at the faint, sudden breeze, his cheek growing cold. 

He wondered that night, lying in bed, if he’d been kissed. 

Occasionally in the winter they grew irritable, and tonight was one of those nights where John kept breaking things and slamming doors, and Smitty would shout back. 

“Oh my god- can you fucking not?” Smitty snapped, spinning on his heel to glare daggers at the door. “I’m obviously studying, dipshit, how would you like it if I blasted pop music 24/7? I bet you wouldn’t, huh?” 

The door swayed violently, repeatedly _almost_ hitting the door frame but falling just short each time. Pouting, it seemed like. Smitty rolled his eyes, dropped his textbook on his desk and sat down, pencil in hand. 

He was mid way through solving a particularly nasty function when his desk lamp flickered spartatically, sending the room dancing in between pitch black and blinding light. 

“Jesus!” Smitty hissed, frustration rising into downright fury, “Can you not just stay-” 

He went suddenly silent at the sound of a thump from downstairs. The flickering ceased, plunging the room into shadows and Smitty held his breath, heart beating wildly as he listened, suddenly deathly paranoid. 

The gentle, faint grind of metal turning and the _’click’_ of a lock rattled throughout the house. 

“I swear to god if you’re pranking me…” Smitty whispered breathlessly, though his voice was faint and weak; non threatening. His pencil vibrated by his hand, rustling slightly against the paper below it, and Smitty’s heart plummeted. He sat, stiff as a board, listening in the painful silence for the occasional rattle or thump from the floor below, brain running a mile a minute. 

There was someone in his fucking house. Someone had broken in- _what the fuck did he do?_

His pencil rattled again; agitated, and Smitty silently rose from his desk, creeping soundlessly over his carpeted floor towards the bed and the closet beyond. There was a light scrape- louder than any previous noise, and Smitty heard the unmistakable squeal of the second stair’s weak wood. 

_Shit shit shit_

Smitty fell into a crouch beside his bed, hand reaching out and grabbing his hockey stick from beneath it, clenching the equipment in a death grip and holding it out in front of him like a weapon. He was trembling. The footsteps grew louder and the air felt stifling; too silent, and he could hear his own breath, could practically feel his pulse trying to enter orbit. 

His knuckles were white over the black athletic tape of his stick. 

The door creaked open slowly and softly the intruder stepped into the room; boots causing gentle swishing against the carpet. Smitty could see their silhouette against the light wallpaper, dark and looming. 

The interuder’s head tilted towards the bed, then swiveled to circle the room instantly, all pretence of stealth forgotten as they leapt upright, and Smitty panicked. He jumped out of a crouch in an instant, swinging his stick and yelling something, and the intruder yelped and snapped their arm out, catching the makeshift weapon and yanking on it, sending Smitty crashing to the floor. 

Smitty rolled over with a gasp, grasping for the bed frame, but then the intruder was on him, slamming his shoulders and head down onto the floor, and _fuck-_ Smitty screamed something wordless and fearful as he thrashed in the man’s grip, struggling to free himself as gloved hands wrapped around his throat and began to squeeze; cutting off the Canadian’s cries in one swift gurgling gasp. 

Smitty’s ears rang as he tried to kick out, tried to knee the man, but his legs were pined down and he couldn’t get the man’s hands off his neck and _his head fucking hurt-_

The man was ripped off of Smitty with such force that the Canadian was thrown backwards against the carpet, his vision spotty as he starred in dazed horror at the intruder who floated several feet in the air, screeching in terror and shock. 

The man thrashed wildly as Smitty gasped, a hand instinctively raised to his throat; unable to tear his eyes away as the intruder dangled helplessly, voice an octave too high in his fearful cries. Suddenly the bedroom door slammed open and Smitty caught movement out of the corner of his eye right as several kitchen knives shot through the air and embedded themselves deep in the intruders stomach, causing him to let out a blood curdling scream that had Smitty dizzy with shock and fear and _holy shit, holt shit-_

With a sickening crunch of bones and squelching of organs, the knives twisted and the man suddenly went rigid, then limp in midair before he dropped lifelessly to the floor, dumped unceremoniously in a pile. 

Smitty stared. 

A faint breeze rustled by his ear, and then Smitty felt himself being lifted up into the air; far gentler than his would-be-killer had been. His felt numb and cold, body trembling and head aching; too disoriented to really register that he was settled on the bed and that an excessive amount of blankets were covering him. 

Some faint part of Smitty’s mind cheerfully told him that he was going into shock. The rest of his body was too busy shivering or clawing at his throat in a panic as pain began to settle in around his neck and jaw. 

The blankets pressed down around him, forcefully, as though being pushed, and slowly the weight and growing warmth drew Smitty away from panic and closer to his body’s demand for sleep, for escape. 

His very last thought before slipping away was really quite trivial. 

His carpet was ruined. 

The next few days were a blur of police and ambulances; questioning and medical evaluations. David and Evan were beside themselves the moment word got out about what had happened, and Smitty himself didn’t fail to see the parallels between his attack and John’s murder. 

He wasn’t allowed into his own house for several weeks, and while he wasn’t under arrest, he was certainly kept under close watch by local authorities. In the end, there wasn’t a trial. It was pretty evident that the man had broken into Smitty’s house with the sole purpose of killing him, as nothing had been stolen or even touched. 

This definitive factor was lucky, because no one pushed too hard into the strange circumstances of the man’s death, such as how he had multiple kitchen knives forcibly and simultaneously thrust into his gut despite Smitty having been half choked, only having two hands and them being up in the bedroom. 

They didn’t comment on it, and Smitty was let off innocent. 

The first night Smitty spent in his house since the one directly following his attack felt strange, surreal. He stepped inside and closed the door quietly behind him, staring out across the dark first floor. 

“I’m home,” He joked, pulling a half-smile. “Missed me?” 

A beat of silence, and then all of the lights turned on without Smitty moving a muscle. For the first time, Smitty properly relaxed, some tiny part of his brain having feared that John wouldn’t have been there when he returned. Something rustled upstairs and Smitty watched in amusement as his own comforter flew through the air and practically attacked him, wrapping around him and squeezing tightly; warm and solid. 

“Yes, I missed you too,” Smitty huffed, and the air around his ears whistled. 

He sank to the hard floor, surrounded by warm breezes and cloth and light, and he grinned. 

“Thank you.” 

The words hung heavy, weighted, meaning far more than they implied. 

The blanket squeezed just a little bit tighter. 

The parallels between Smitty’s attack and John’s death in the past brought the cold case back to life. Neither Smitty (nor Evan when they talked later) were particularly surprised when a police officer knocked on Smitty’s door and told him about John’s death (which Smitty pretended not to know about) and how the man who had attacked Smitty was the same one who had murdered John. 

A part of Smitty smirked inside, thinking the man’s violent death a fitting revenge. 

It was likely, the officer told him, that the man had observed both how long Smitty was residing at the house and his trip to the police station to collect John’s rings and decided he was a threat to possibly exposing his crime. It was even possibly he’d been stalking Smitty and overheard some of his conversations with Evan (that one really freaked the Canadian out), and all of that drove the man to try and ‘shut Smitty up’. 

That night for the first time, it well and truly set in that Smitty could have died that night. The realization must have settled in for John as well, as the poltergeist was particularly clingy with his blanket hugs and excessively vengeful against Smitty’s plates. 

Smitty was curled up on the couch, rubbing the blanket idly between his fingertips when he finally voiced the thought that’d been on his mind for a while. 

“Are you able to move on now? Because you killed the man who had killed you?” 

He watched silently as a pen rose off of a nearby coffee table and began to scribble on the notepad beside them on the couch. 

_probably_

“...are you going to?” Smitty whispered, and after a beat of silence, listened to the scratching of the pen. 

_are you planning on dying soon?_

“No,” Smitty huffed in amusement, and a small smile began to settle on his lips as the pen continued. 

_then no_

Smitty sunk back into the cushions of the couch and let the blanket wrap around him, let the cold breeze of John’s presence chill his nose. 

“Okay,” Smitty agreed quietly, and he sat there with a little grin, warm and cold and he realized that he really, really liked his roommate. 

“Night John,” he whispered tiredly, and the faint whistle of wind in response sounded almost like a ‘goodnight.’

**Author's Note:**

> leave a comment if you enjoyed! <3


End file.
